He likes it! Hey Linus!

Now to separate the get-off-my-lawners from those who need to get off the lawn . . .

Those who get the reference in the blog’s title can read on; those who don’t — and it’s generational, trust me — can watch here.

A few days ago on Google+, reported on later in a Muktware blog post, Linus Torvalds talked about his recent foray with KDE. Generally, he likes it, though his praise — stop me if you’ve heard this before — is still tempered by the things he finds he doesn’t like.

He likes the ability to configure things (who doesn’t?), despite the “odd and distracting default behavior” (behavior that, of course, can be changed). But then he goes on to give KDE a test run by fiddling with the desktop widgets.

According to the Muktware blog, Linus continues: “As a result, right now my terminal and web browser buttons look like a drunken fratboy has been messing with my desktop. I suspect I’ll turn them back to their boring upright position (because that’s how I roll – boring), but for now I’m mildly amused by the sheer whimsicality of it all.”

First things first: There are thousands, possibly millions, who “roll” a lot more boring than Linus, but let’s put that aside. What’s important is that, like when he tried Xfce, it gives those who are developing desktop environments a few minutes with the creator, for better or worse. Further, and more importantly, Linus’ example also shows that we don’t have to stick with one desktop/program/software forever.

In other words, from time to time, change is good.

This blog, and all other blogs by Larry the Free Software Guy, Larry the CrunchBang Guy and Larry Cafiero, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND license. In short, this license allows others to download this work and share it with others as long as they credit me as the author, but others can’t change it in any way or use it commercially.

(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and develops business software at Redwood Digital Research, a consultancy that provides FOSS solutions in the small business and home office environment.)

I switched to KDE when GNOME 3 loomed and have never looked back. I find that KDE’s okular is superior to GNOME’s evince and that Konqueror works better with the unfortunate Outlook Web Access than either chromium or firefox. YMMV! And KDE is, of course, very pretty. Many of the configurations I wanted took a while to figure out; GNOME is better documented.

If I had time for toys, maybe I’d try a tablet. But I use my hardware for work and that requires a little more than just the ability to watch YouTube videos and play games. Switching desktop environments (or going to window managers, like Openbox) is the “change” that I’m looking at here.